Fourth Day Of Violence For Uzbeks

An explosion hit the Uzbek capital Wednesday night, police said, and a news agency reported casualties in a fourth straight day of violence in the Central Asian country.

The blast hit the Sabir-Rakhimovski district, which is in northern Tashkent, and the Interfax news agency said it had caused an unknown number of casualties.

Police were carrying out an operation in that neighborhood, said Ilya Pyagay, deputy chief of the anti-terrorism department of the Interior Ministry. He did not elaborate.

The area is not far from the scene of Tuesday's fighting in which 20 militants and three police were killed.

A Western security official also said he had been informed of a blast, and that residents had seen fire trucks racing to the scene of the explosion. Witnesses also saw police cars heading the area.

Police blocked off streets in the district, where a police officer on the scene said an explosion had occurred. He declined to give his name.

An Associated Press reporter saw police escorting three women wearing kerchiefs into a police car, and four trucks packed with soldiers arrived in the area to push back onlookers.

Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency earlier reported a blast also struck a residential building in the Fergana Valley city of Andijan overnight, citing police sources. The explosion could have been an accident, but police did not rule out terrorism. Officials declined to confirm the report.

The reported blasts came after a day in which police reportedly arrested at least 30 militants in a sweep of the Uzbek capital. A police official said those in custody so far were adherents of the strict Wahhabi Islamic sect, which was believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden, but not members of an extremist group President Islam Karimov has implied were behind the attacks.

Since Sunday, at least 42 people have been killed in terrorist-related violence in Uzbekistan — the first unrest here since this Central Asian nation became a key U.S. ally in the war on terror.

Oleg Bichenov, Tashkent city police anti-terrorism deputy chief, declined to confirm how many had been arrested so far.

"The number (of the arrested) will be changing, and I hope it will be going up," he told The Associated Press. "We are continuing to search for suspects and making arrests."

Earlier, a Western security official in Tashkent told AP on condition of anonymity that police and security officers were looking for five suspects.

Nineteen people were killed and 26 wounded on Sunday and Monday in violence that included the first suicide bombings in this Central Asian nation. On Tuesday, 23 people died as Uzbek forces battled for hours with suspected terrorists, and were struck by two suicide attacks.

All the attacks appeared to target Uzbek authorities.

The Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan — where access already is strictly controlled — had been closed to all except diplomatic traffic, the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent said.

An embassy annex office remained closed, although visa operations resumed. Americans were urged to be on "highest alert," as the situation remained unclear.

Bichenov said those in custody were being questioned at length — but that interrogations so far found that none was a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group. Instead, he said the suspects were aligned with the Wahhabi sect of Islam.

On Monday, Kadyrov said religious literature from Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Wahhabi sect had been found at an alleged terrorist bomb-making factory in the central region of Bukhara.

Hizb ut-Tahrir — which claims to disavow violence while not explicitly ruling it out in its quest to create an Islamic state across the world — has never been linked to any terrorist attacks. Its office in Britain, where the group is allowed to operate openly, denied responsibility for events in Uzbekistan.

Uzbek authorities claim Hizb ut-Tahrir is a breeding ground for terrorists and have sought unsuccessfully to have Washington label it a terrorist group.

The Wahhabi sect is dominant in Saudi Arabia and has attracted many followers across Central Asia and the Caucasus.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States had no information on who was responsible for the attacks but noted the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan has been the dominant threat in the country.

That terror group was believed to have been decimated in the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, and Pakistani forces this month hunting al Qaeda fugitives on the Afghan border said they wounded the IMU's political leader.

Security remained tighter than usual Wednesday in Tashkent, with soldiers and police searching vehicles at checkpoints. An armored personnel carrier also remained in place on the road leading out of the city toward Karimov's official residence, near the area of suicide bombings and battles between authorities and suspected militants.

Residents near the area of Tuesday's fighting said five men escaped, although it wasn't clear if some of them had been killed at another charred house nearby pockmarked with bullet holes, where residents saw four bodies in the courtyard.

The Interior Ministry said the fighting Tuesday killed three police and wounded five. It said 20 terror suspects died and that all of them blew themselves up, but that contradicted accounts that government forces killed some of the militants in shootouts.

By Burt Herman